Backwoods Dungeon

Chapter Fifty

The Fallen

Rio

Despite the weird nature of this place, somehow connecting at least Florida, Montana, Honduras, and little Boyerton, Missouri, it was still recognizably a cave. It seemed like any number of caves I’d been in before. There were big caverns. There were small caverns. There were a lot of tunnels and there wasn’t much rhyme or reason to them. Some parts of them showed obvious signs of excavation, and some couldn't be anything but manmade.

They were wet. Sometimes, the stone was shorn as smooth as glass, while compacted rock and debris had created steady footing in others. Still other places remained mostly untouched by the water and were jagged and sharp.

There were a lot of tunnels that seemed too small for us to get through, but there was never a complete lack of a path. We never had to get on our knees and crawl, which was the strangest part of the whole experience. This cave was partially a mine where imps had dug through the rock.

None of us were spelunkers, but I’d spent some time binge-watching YouTube videos about people getting stuck in caves for a while. It was super grim and had conditioned me to think that sooner or later, all cave systems got small, tight, cramped, and generally terrifying.

With the exception of its terrifying denizens, this place was none of those. Our light, now generated by Theo’s fancy Druid circlet, which looked all sorts of ridiculous, seemed to illuminate a huge area around us without being blinding or intrusive like the flashlights were. I saw some absolutely breathtaking sights as the cave walls, pools, stalagmites, and rivulets all sparkled like unearthed disco balls.

This had the unfortunate effect of illuminating some very dead bodies in the next small cavern we came across.

“Jesus Christ!” Dane shouted, spotting them first on a ledge a little further down. There weren’t any enemies in the cavern, so it seemed we’d escaped any retribution for our battle earlier. Feeling at least a little more confident in our abilities, we crept up to the dead bodies.

They were cops, for sure, but not regular ones. These guys looked like professionals. The A Team. The ones I'd seen on TV shows accompanying the protagonists, wearing masks, body armor, and carrying–!

“This is a fucking M4 Carbine!” Dane exclaimed as he went for the gun.

I was not excited at all. I watched the thought travel through his mind at a glacial pace. Excitement turned to horror.

“Right. What could kill a team like this?” I asked, uncomfortably turning one of the men over to get a better look. “Surely not imps or even the spiders, right?”

“Grab the dog tags,” Theo said sharply before backpedaling as he searched. “Or… shit, the ID cards, I guess? This guy doesn’t have dog tags, but we need some way to let his family know. Something they can use up top to identify them.”

“This one does,” I said sourly, pulling the black tag off the dead man’s neck. The blood was mostly dried on these guys, telling me they’d been dead for a little while. A day? Two? How long had the government known about something weird going on down here? As long as Theo had? Weeks?

“We… should take the weapons. Do either of you know how to shoot them?” I asked.

“One for each of us and all the magazines we can find,” Theo said. “I’ll bury the rest, along with them. I… wish we could get them back up but I don’t want to risk our only portal stone. Also, who knows how many more groups like this one we’ll find down here.”

I was actually a bit glad they were all wearing those night vision masks. It dehumanized them. Kept me from retching and mitigated the skeevy feeling of graverobbing. Still… I had a machine gun now. Ho Ho Ho.

If I could save even one of those people with this, it was worth it…

“Uhm. Guys…? This guy was killed by bullets, I think,” I said.

“Hey, you’re right,” Dane said.

“This guy, too,” Theo confirmed.

“You… don’t think…?” I asked, horrified.

“Good god, I hope not,” Theo said, reading my mind. “I don’t think that’s it, though. Look over there.”

I looked to where he pointed and saw a lone dead imp lying against the wall. The poor thing was absolutely filled with bullets. There were shell casings everywhere.

“Could this have been an accident?” I asked, shocked.

“Huh?” Dane asked while Theo looked equally confused.

“I don’t think these guys were killed by anything from down here. We might be better off without the assault rifles, though. At least while we’re in relatively small caves like this one,” I said.

“Oh, god. You think…?” Theo asked, shocked.

I nodded. “They killed themselves. These guys died because they fired assault rifles in a small cave. Ricochets killed them.”

“But… but that’s moronic!” Dane protested.

I shrugged thoughtfully. “I don’t know if I would’ve thought of it if I hadn’t spotted the bullet wounds, and you seemed pretty excited by that M4. You see firefights on TV all the time. Every other episode of Law and Order has a squad that looks exactly like these guys, and they always charge in guns blazing.”

“No. No way. There’s no way a real swat team or feds or… or whoever these guys are could be that dumb,” Dane insisted.

“It doesn’t take a squad. With a gun like this? Just one mistake,” I said bitterly.

Theo pulled a wallet, of all things, out of one of the men’s pockets and looked at his ID. “Anthony Burnette. Guy was only twenty-two. I… dammit this sounds fucked up, but I sure as hell hope that’s what happened. If the imps are picking up guns, I’m going to need more than a circlet and two points in armor,” Theo said.

If the imps had guns… well, if the imps had guns we were all dead, and we had no chance of getting Chester, Todd, Tessa, or any of them out alive anyway. If they didn’t, we were only probably dead.

We all went quiet for a time, grim thoughts crossing our minds.

“Do you know anything about that? The armor stat, I mean?” I asked, desperate to change the subject.

“Not really. My pants give me some, and so did the breastplate the feds took. I can only assume it makes us harder to kill, but I don’t really see how,” Theo replied. “I’ve got a skill called Cyclone Armor, but it doesn’t change my armor stat. There’s nowhere to look and see the totals. The attributes screen doesn’t have a spot for it. Other than that and the skills screens, I haven’t found any other menus. Have you?”

I shook my head. “Considering how complicated all the menus in your games look, this setup seems pretty simple. Shoot things, get more numbers, and get a skill every time you get more numbers. Easy.”

Theo rolled his eyes good-naturedly.

I sighed. “I think we should hang on to these, but unless we happen to be in a really big cave, or up against someone like the demon knight, they should be a last resort. Plus, we don’t exactly have endless ammunition, but our mana can always recharge.”

“Save the items, spend the mana? Now you’re gaming,” Theo said, and it was my turn to roll my eyes.

“We need to get a move on,” I said. I shouldn’t be entertaining these jokes. With every second I wasted, it became more and more likely that the people I’d met were dead. I liked the sense of normalcy, though. Craved it.

There was... nothing stopping us from going back up. Nothing we had to do here. We were risking our lives for no gain, only to soothe my conscience. I wasn't turning back though. All things considered, I felt I was holding up rather well after seeing at least eight people die in front of me and abandoning the rest to who knew what. Having a goal helped. Finally doing something after days spent twiddling my thumbs was more relief than all the warm baths could ever be.

That was what I kept telling myself when images of a skeleton snapping Cole’s neck returned.

Unfortunately, I knew it was probably for the best that we hadn’t immediately found the prison once again. There would be no sneaking in. I might be able to with Phase, but with the way the underground fortress was set up, that would be a one-way trip to no advantage. We had to go in hot, or not at all. To do that, we needed more experience, better equipment, more levels, and more skills.

Actually... with the portal stones, Phasing in quietly might not be such a bad idea. Insanely risky, but if I had enough...? Well. I'd think about that when we got there.

It ate at me, though. The guilt. No matter how many times I went over it, I couldn’t think of anything else I could’ve done. Better to escape, better to live and come back just like I had done.

Finding these… soldiers? Cops? They weren’t dressed anything like Officer Dancer, but they were clearly part of some organization. Finding these servicemen down here dead told me that the Feds weren’t completely bullshitting us. They were doing something. Someone was, anyway.

Perhaps I hadn’t needed to be so brazen. Buying guns from Dane and seeking a clandestine way back into the caves to try and rescue people I’d just met? I was a glorified accountant, for god’s sake! All this to assuage my conscience? Stupid. Probably fatally so.

…But I was doing it anyway, and if there were more people down here that might be able to help, I was all for it. I wanted to kill that fucking Demon Knight. I wanted to see him bleed.

We gathered three of the guns from the four dead servicemen, as well as all the ammunition they carried. There was no spare food or water, which told us that there were probably more of these guys down here.

Theo buried them with his skill and a short prayer. It wasn’t much but it was all we could do, for the time being. We had to focus on the living.

We left the small cave with heavy hearts but more determined than ever. These things were becoming more than just some creatures bubbling up from below. They were becoming an enemy. An enemy of all of us.

I couldn’t help but think of what that would mean if fighting demons suddenly became a thing. The news had only just broken, and people still couldn’t believe it. Of those that did, half probably thought we could come to peaceful negotiations with the fuckers, but they’d learn soon enough.

Politically, these demons were a fucking goldmine in more ways than one. They were a uniting factor. Democrats, Republicans during peacetime? It might as well be war. But give them both a concrete evil enemy to prioritize over their usual squabbles, and suddenly, the politician who backed a plan to exterminate them would find themselves elected in a heartbeat.

It would be like it was after nine-eleven. The United States and maybe even other affected countries would all have a common goal for the first time in decades. If these demons were as big of a deal as I feared they were, anyway.

All of that only affected my job tangentially. I wasn’t technically a politician. I was in Urban Development. Zoning. Making sure idiots didn’t decide to build a residential area downwind of a dump. I tended to end up in courthouses and town halls often enough to see the way this would go, though.

Maybe… maybe I should run for office?

I chuckled. Nah. Who would vote for me?

Still… if they didn’t take this seriously…? After all that Luca had told me, maybe these Elder Demons really were existential threats to humanity. If that was true, wasn’t I obligated to get myself into the best position possible to prepare us for it?

Questions for later. For now, I had to free some captives and maybe steal a seal along the way.